Twenty years ago today I rode out the Northridge earthquake in an old brick apartment building in Hollywood with my new little gray tabby kittens, Shadow and Shade, and then wrote this poem about it:

Kittens and I Get the Shakes

Earthquake train roars, apartment shack shakes me martini, dice.
I naked in doorjamb prop up three floors like Atlas. Tiny grey
Puffball urchin faces, eyes wide marbles, peek from under futon.

 
Turned out to also be the first night that my now-wife Elise ever spent in Los Angeles, just about a mile away, near Beechwood Canyon and also in Hollywood. We wouldn’t meet until some weeks later, on St. Patrick’s Day. Fate gave us a shared experience, but did not yet bring us together.

As the poem indicates, I’d been sleeping naked when the quake hit early in the morning. I jumped up. The power went out. I always thought standing in a doorway was a dumb idea. I always figured they just told us that so they’d know where to find the bodies in the rubble. So I ran to the front door of my apartment, still naked, and threw it open, to the sound of dozens of other residents running down the hallway toward the back door.

I thought, this is life or death, I shouldn’t care if I run out there naked. But it turns out I did care. So I went and stood in an inside doorway, feeling ridiculous and stupid all the way around.

After the quaking stopped, it took me a long time to find the kittens, peeking out at me from under the futon in my office, with a quizzical and hurt look on their faces, as if they were saying, “What did we do? Why did you make the house shake like that? Whatever it is, we’re sorry and we’ll never do it again!” Which lets you know how traumatized they were, because cats rarely if ever make such a promise.